KPIs – key to success

When you look at your numbers, do you see how you’re doing? Do you see how close or how far away the business is from realising your goals? What are you measuring that will tell you whether you’re racing or just revving the engine?

What are your key performance indicators? And how many of them are there?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the measures your business uses to track progress against your business goals. Your KPIs relate closely to your goals and, if you are going to track performance against goals, you need to be able to measure them.

KPIs need to mean something to you and your team so that the strategic planning session doesn’t just fizzle out under a blanket of corporate-speak. You know the terms: efficient, effective, community engagement, sustainability, productivity, blah blah blah.

They all meant something when they started out in life but unless they mean something to you and your team right now, you may as well watch your team slip gently into a deep sleep. What about the conversion rate from quotations to sales? The average sale to new customers? The number of stock outages or complaint rate?

Not every business is the same and not every business owner wants the same things. So each business’ KPIs may look different.

Work on KPIs with your team

When you develop your strategic plan with your team and you work out your goals for the next year, what are the factors that will indicate most clearly how well the business is progressing towards meeting those goals? Try and keep it to six or fewer for the business overall.

It may turn out when the team starts to talk about it that different parts of the business measure their success in different ways. If you find this, work out KPIs for each department (not too many) and make sure it’s clear how they feed in to the KPIs for the business overall.

If you know what your goals are but it’s not clear how you will measure whether you’re achieving them, why not talk to us about working out KPIs to suit your business.